Wendy Wang didn’t know when the director of financial aid sat next to her in the cafeteria years ago that she would soon take the first steps on a long and fulfilling career path.
But San Diego City College’s new director of financial aid started both her education and her career on a community college campus and has been developing her expertise in the field ever since.
She has worked at every level of a financial aid office, from her first work-study job at Pierce College in Los Angeles, to becoming a financial aid assistant, then a technician. She has learned the field, she said, from “the bottom ground” up.
All those years of dedication have helped shape her vision for City College’s office, including improving messaging to both students and other departments – in part, via a new financial aid social media team – streamlining processes so students can get their funds faster – more electronic payments, less snail mail with a long-term goal of going paperless – and adding training opportunities for both new and veteran staff.
Her hands-on approach to tasks, to “tackle the small things, get it done with, then we all can see the improvement,” is indicative of her team-focused management style.
“I’m trying to build that relationship and build it as a model,” she said.
Wang has a creative and adventurous spirit. She enjoys sewing and crafting in her free time, and also biking from her inland Oceanside home to the harbor, but those jaunts are short compared to the ones she took in her youth, as her parents had a company that did business abroad.
In fact, the native of Hong Kong re-directed her family’s fortunes when she was young. As a teen, with her loved ones planning a move to Canada, Wang traveled to Edmonton, but found the city too cold. Tagging along on a friend’s visit to Los Angeles, she called it the perfect alternative: “I came down and said, ‘I love it.’” She opted to go to school in Southern California and her family followed in her footsteps.
After Wang married and began her own family, she moved to the San Diego area and shifted away from community colleges for a while, holding posts at Cal State San Marcos and a nonprofit campus, the Gemological Institute of America in Carlsbad. But with her boys now grown into young men, her father, as he lay dying last year, told her to think about her passion and “do something that is really for your heart.”
Wang couldn’t help but think of returning to a community college setting. She told him and he said, “go for it. Do it.” Months later, still grieving his loss, she started looking, and found the opening at City College.
“He definitely looked after me,” she said.